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So, HP, What Exactly Are You Trying To Sell Us?
billtom writes "There's an article over at c|net news where the normally fawning technology business press actually takes an HP VP to task for the extremely vague statements that usually surround enterprise software 'products.' With some gems like 'That could be boilerplate applying to any company,' and 'But again, how does that differ from what's been around?' and 'But hasn't that always been the goal?'" I'd like to see Charles Cooper interview whoever came up with .Net, too.
I think the companies that bought into the Internet era blitz in the 90's, all thought there was a magic bullet that could rocket them to the future. The problem is, that they, like everyone else, were duped into buying hype that was based around nothing more than shallow promises of a better today.
The jargon coming from HP, is to try and market to company types with buying power, to give them a new slogan or saying that could be used to grab onto and use in the office, so that they don't have to do any work.
Scott Adams' Dilbert cartoon captures the reality of what's going on today. Executives would rather appear to be working, than actually working, so they invent new descriptions of what they are doing that sound really busy!
I think the best slogan is hard work, but nobody likes hard work, unless someone else is doing it.
From the article: "I define AE as a business strategy for customers who want to respond in real time to changes affecting their business."
Translation: We know your business operates in something called time. Time is money. We want money, so therefore we will trade you your own time for money. We accomplish this by selling you your own time back, but we change it to something called real-time. Or ideally I have no idea what those geeks in research have come up with and it's not my job to know, so I'll just make something up and hope you bite. Besides, none of the marketing based people will understand what they came up with anyway, so who cares?
That said, check out this gem:
He should never have needed to ask that twice. HP's response was clear to anyone who's been struggling to cultivate dynamic convergence in their disintermediate, yet robust, technologies.
I work IT for one of the lower-end Fortune 500 companies (I won't mention any names, but we're the 2nd largest manufacturer of Internet-enabled personal sanitation devices in the U.S.), and we're seriously looking at HP's AE technology for our next round of upgrades. I am so tired of having to re-virtualize all our front-end functionalities every time the boss-man wants to streamline our synergistic e-services. Now, if I simply had a frictionless front-end action-item, right there in my real-time vortal (vertical portal) I'd be made.
Anyway, Slashdotters, don't believe this CNET FUD. I think AE definitely has the potential to recontextualize the debate on revolutionary mindshare schemas.
Every software company is guilty of this. A program that does general ledger and billing sounds much sexier when called a "best-of-breed integrated calculation solution, designed to drive your business into the 21st century and beyond." And a server-monitoring tool sounds better when you call it a "proactive fault-finding and troubleshooting environment, making your data center fully autonomic and self-healing."
It's kind of wierd for the press to actually start asking hard questions. Think tanks like Gartner et al live and die by techno-hype. The latest thing going around in CIO-land is Utility Computing, so we'll see what comes of that.
That said, I think utility computing is applicable only to a narrow market so far. You need compatability between various applications to host them within a single environment that shares data center resources. When I look around my company (a $1.5 billion worldwide manufacturer), for example, I see dozens of applications on several different operating systems at various versions. How does utility computing address such a heterogeneous environment?
About the only time she made sense was at the very end:
How true...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Q: Stripped of all the jargon and market-speak, can you succinctly define what Adaptive Enterprise is supposed to be about?
A: We proudly adapt to the needs of our enterprise: namely, the CEO, the CIO, and our board members. Screw the rest of the employees and the customers. Aside from that, we really have no idea what the heck we're talking about. We need to make up big words in long sententces to justify our existence in the company. This is the same mindset that allowed us to have fantastic ideas like merging with Compaq, laying off thousands of employees, while giving Capellas the goodbye gift that one can only dream about.
Q: That could be boilerplate applying to any company. What's the special sauce?
A: The special sauce is no different than what you find in Burger King. We sit around all day long whacking off in an effort to come up with this sh--.
Q: Can't you get that by going to any reputable company out there? Sun, IBM--that's what they're about. Am I missing something here?
A: Nope. They're all the same formula. Same sauce. Right down to the last drop.
Why do they let people like this run companies, or even speak? I mean christ, MS APIs are more well-understood than that buzzword soup.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
The slashdot article makes it sound pretty bad, and admittedly c|net doesn't make it look great (honestly I thought this was a case of a bad interviewer, not a good one). However, this is not really that bad.
AE is more just a term to associate with a different way of looking at the enterprise. While, it is not terribly different from what went on before, it is an evolutionary change. As the HP VP says, it's not a product or a technology, just a way of looking at using technology in an Enterprise.
I can tell you in the Enterprise space 10 years ago, folks used to get excited about being able to add new products to their IT systems within 6 months (I kid you not). The notion of AE is that it should be measured in days. I'm sure some day it'll be down to hours or even minutes.
Traditional Enterprise systems were increadibly static and rigid, and over time they are evolving to be much more dynamic and malleable. While this is nothing new to tech folks like us, it's a bit of a wake up call to the business folks who are just getting used to implications of how to mix business and IT based on how things were 5 years ago.
Again as the VP says, it's not that you can't work towards AE without HP. You can go to anybody for it. His claims about HP's uniqueness are another story (let's face it, all that can be unique when you're talking about providing expertise to execute on an abstract busines strategy is the brand name, and the trust/confidence associated with it).
So yeah, on one hand it is marketing BS, but on the other hand you need a marketing message in order to communicate to business folks how IT capabilities have evolved and how they can go beyond the existing set of limitations they have come to expect of IT.
sigs are a waste of space
Disclaimer: I was recently laid off as my position was outsourced to HP.
First, I don't think that the VP ever really answered the questions that were asked. I think the whole point behind trying to sell the Adaptive Enterprise is that it is not something you can clearly define. I'd hate to actually do contract negotiations with them as I'm sure both parties will have different thoughts on what is covered under HP services.
The whole line about being able to dynamically restructure your IT resources to me means HP can help you figure out how to axe 1/3rd of your workforce and still "adapt" to your business needs. As the interviewer pointed out, aligning IT with your business it nothing new. Hiring outside consultants to help do it is nothing new.
It begs the question, what is new about adaptive enterprise? Answer: Nothing. I don't see any proof that it is anything more than another marketing strategy designed to sell billable hours and support/consulting contracts.
A pirate ("Arr, we'll return on yer investment, matey, just hand over the doubloons...")
A Parrot ("Squawk! Polly wants leverage, polly wants synergies leveraged, squawk!"
A dog trainer ("Sit, marketing rep! Now, demonstrate CRM, demonstrate CR- SIT! bad rep! Shame on you!")
Mr. Hainey from Green Acres ( "I bet you'll be wantin' one o' these here market share segments, to go with that product, won'cha?")
Krusty the Clown ("Hey hey!! Now 'does not cause instant bankruptcy' in every box!")
Dr. Evil ("I'll give you ten minutes to amuse me. Begin your presentation....NOW.")
Personally, i think HP is counting on non-technical word of mouth and goodwill, which is why all these ads focus on things like preserving artwork and capturing criminals- if your other managers like the HP ads, they're more likely to approve HP-related spending... and think that it's worth it, even if they don't understand the product or the language describing it.
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
The utility computing aspects of the 'adaptive enterprise' are quite real and you can buy it today in the form of the HP Utility Data Center. In a word, UDC is about infrastructure automation - a data center in which you can rapidly deploy (and redeploy) servers and services with no hands-on work, and not requiring you to have a huge, specialized support staff.
To really have an adaptive enterprise, you need more things layered on top of infrastructure automation, but it is a key building block. Other vendors like Sun and IBM are selling this type of concept, but I think you'll find that HP has more actual products than the competition. HP's marketing does stink though.
The VP's real problem is her attitude to information that suggests potential customers don't understand what the hell their AE angle is supposed to be about. When prompted that no customers understood Carly's presentation, she said she thought the customers were wrong and that she thought it was very clear.
While kissing the boss's ass is usually a good thing, it doesn't matter how clear you think something is - if the customers don't understand it, it's NOT CLEAR. And that's the bottom line.
The interviewer was a good litmus for that too. He is (presumably) somewhat well versed in IT, had the benefit of asking follow-up questions, and still couldn't figure out what the hell HP is doing. Not good for HP.
Really, the HP crowd give the impression that they've talked this up so much between each other that it must be gold. Sounds like some serious groupthink. They think they've got this great operation defined by killer buzzwords, we think they're an IBM knockoff with a bad PR campaign.
If you ask me, it sounds like .Net all over again. What the hell was .Net? I still don't know. They need to learn from IBM - clearly explained yet funny commercials. IBM's commercials tell me their software puts customer data together. HP's tell me that vigilante plus-signs put bad guys in jail. How? I dunno.
And that's a problem for HP.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
You ought to be modded +5 Insightful on that one. As a professional developer, I'm sick of PHB's buying into the white-shoed-salesman jargon. At JPMorgan Chase, my PHB bought a $200,000 "system" from Cisco for handling customer service team e-mails. When it failed miserably, I and another developer wrote an SMTP front end in a matter of weeks (our time cost JMPC $7200) and it had more features.
Our manager asked why we didn't mention we could do that before, which shocked me. My response was that he never mentioned this new "system" until it was already paid for. We were his programmers, and this was a programming issue. In the future he should consider talking to his programmers before he spent massive sums on ideas.
He's since been fired.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
I hate to spring to the defense of Big Corporations, but it's really not that hard to interpret Marketsp'aek positively:
:)
"I define AE as a business strategy for customers who want to respond in real time to changes affecting their business."
My translation: AE is (an expensive product which helps companies setup) a business strategy under which trends trigger actions. The use of 'business strategy' sounds meaningless, but it's actually two words which imply two paragraphs. 'Strategy' in this case is an overloaded term referring to a collection of tools, policies, and proceedures.
The use of 'real time' in business means something very different from its meaning in computer science. It means 'today' instead of 'eventually'. I work for a large media company with an animal for a mascot, and it takes us years to respond to changes in the marketplace. Most of our innertia is rooted in size, conservative management, and fear of risk. However, if we had a system of automation which identified potentially interesting changes in the marketplace, especially in merchandising, it could save us a lot of money.
For example, how much should we invest in online sales, and how much in more traditional sales? We make money from both, now, so it's a very serious question. A missed sale is a lost sale, but there's no point in trying to extract blood from a turnip. We have people who try to figure out where the tastiest blood is, but they are limited by their tools and proceedures. This AE might actually be just the thing they need.
I don't know if AE is any good, or if it's what it claims to be, but I do know that marketing speak CAN have a real meaning in a marketing context. When we geeks ridicule the suits for talking gibberish, it's no better than when they ridicule us for our acronyms, l33t, tech talk and other not-quite-english that we use. "We aggregate packet-based transactions, over-selling a large pipe to small nodes who could collectively saturate that pipe, but in practice don't" would mean nothing to a marketing type, but to an ISP sysadmin it's her raison d'etre.
If we hope to make any progress in the things that really matter (digital freedom), we need to learn to communicate with these people. Their protocols may be bad, but it works for them, and marketing types don't have firmware upgrades, so we need to learn to speak their protocols if we hope to route any traffic through them, or to comandeer them for our noble purposes.